CHINA: China bade a fond farewell to Ba Jin yesterday, one of the country's best-loved novelists despite his anarchist tendencies.
His 70-year career spanned a tumultuous century encompassing warlords, nationalists, communists and capitalists with Chinese characteristics. He was 101 when he died.
Ba Jin was the pen name of Li Feigan, a key member of a generation of young Chinese intellectuals in the early 20th century that looked to western philosophies - Marxism, anarchism and liberalism - for solutions to China's social problems.
Ba Jin's death will make it much more difficult for China to fulfil its long-held desire to win the Nobel Prize for literature. Ba was always a prime contender for the honour.
Unlike other prominent writers, Ba stayed on in China after Mao Zedong's communists seized power in 1949 because he had been critical of the corruption under Chiang Kai-shek's nationalists.
However, like many other intellectuals, Ba was attacked and humiliated by ultra-leftist Red Guards during the terror of the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution.
As newspapers carried tributes to the writer, there was some debate over where his pen name hailed from.
Western agencies reported that the name was made up of the Chinese pronunciation of the first and last syllables of Russian anarchists Bakunin and Kropotkin, reflecting his early fascination with individual freedom.
However, the official Xinhua news agency said he chose Ba in memory of Baranpo, a schoolmate in France who committed suicide, while Jin was proposed by a Russian schoolmate.
Ba was the last member of the first generation of Chinese writers to use the vernacular rather than formal Chinese.
"We have lost one of the most sensitive hearts of our time and one of the most important and widely read Chinese writers of the 20th century," Chen Sihe, dean of Chinese literature at Shanghai's Fudan University, wrote in the China Daily.
His main works included Family, Spring, Autumn and The Trilogy of Love, and Xinhua described his work as a landmark of modern Chinese culture.
"Since I'm not good at speaking, I have to turn to writing to express my feelings, my love and hatred, and to let out the fire within me. Never for a moment will I put down my pen. It is kindling a fire within me," he once said.
He was a driving force behind efforts to build a national museum of the Cultural Revolution, a dream which never bore fruit although a smaller regional version is operating near Shantou.